Bass can be caught in chilly spring, too

Patience, right place helps anglers

The first weeks of spring are always a tough time for local bass anglers.

There are sunny days occasionally, and temperatures that reach into the 50s, but the water is ice cold. Those who fish can get the itches and twitches on days like those.

After a long winter of fingering rods and playing with new lures, the urge is just to get out there and get a line wet. Most bassers, though, don't expect to catch much, if anything.

"I'm just practicing" is a common refrain.

But you can catch cold-water bass in fair numbers if you have patience, the proper offerings, the correct techniques and the right place.

Sounds like a lot of ifs, but the basics are simpler than you might think. For openers, your top spots are area farm ponds and for good reasons. One, they're small, and that means you can cover every inch of a one- to two-acre pond in a few hours. Two, being small, they invariably having dark mud bottoms.

They will warm up quicker, especially shallow areas.

The first time I ever fished a farm pond that still has ice crusted around its shore, I did my casting with a four-inch worm and retrieved as usual. Nothing happened. Then I remembered that cold-water bass are very sluggish, and slowed my retrieve down to a literal crawl. In eight feet of water, I had a tap that materialized into a two-pound bass, then half an hour later another tap that produced a slightly smaller fish.

It was a bright sunny afternoon and when nothing more turned up deep, I switched to shallow water, continued my extremely slow retrieve, and picked up four more bass. A good day by any standard, and it didn't take long to figure out why the bass behaved that way.

Laregemouths spend most of their time deep in any farm pond (or lake), but they love warmth, even a few degrees. So, as my afternoon progressed that sunny day, the shallows warmed up a bit, and the fish went there.

These days I'll strictly cast deep water areas on cloudy days, and do the same on sunny mornings. But given good sunlight, late afternoon is a prime time to look for thin water spots. And I still use four-inch worms, simply because I catch more fish on them.

Half frozen bass don't seem interested in a big offering, maybe because their metabolism and digestion are very slow at that time.

In larger lakes, I use much the same techniques with one difference. Four-inch worms still work fine, but I've learned to fish a small pig-and-jig combination along mud banks that drop off quickly.

I tried this first long years ago on Grand Lake St. Mary's on a morning so cold that only an idiot would have ventured forth with a fishing rod. We worked the canals, cast our pig-and-jigs almost onto dry land, then hopped them back down the mud banks, raising a puff of silt at every hop.

There were bass there, holding at three to five feet, and they loved the jigs. Our largest bass weighed five pounds, and was so cold and sluggish that it was in the net in seconds. You can use the same technique on area lakes, a pig-and-jig on one rod, a four-inch worm on the other. They'll take fish if you work them slowly.

Here's a final tactic that should produce when nothing else does. Head back to the farm pond again with a few three-inch minnows. Hook them through the lips with a splitshot and thin float, and let the little critters swim around some sunny afternoon in three to five feet of water. Something moving at wind drift slow, but active and easy to catch is more than most bass can stand.

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Bass can be caught in chilly spring, too

The first weeks of spring are always a tough time for local bass anglers.